The collecting of first editions is, in its present form, a diversion of recent growth. Fifty years ago amateurs of books were few in number and, necessarily, rich in gold, for only the great books of past literature were regarded as fit material for collection, and great books, though cheaper then than now, were never to be had for love. But the passage of time has transformed, in another way than that of mere numbers, the community of book-collectors. Not only are there nowadays more collectors and a greater variety of books collected, but there has come to its own the great principle of original condition. This is not so pale a platitude as to many it will appear. A few book-buyers there have always been to whom original binding, original end-papers, uncut edges, incidental advertisements, errata slips, and half-titles have meant perfection. But they were rare exceptions. To the large majority a first edition was a book of a certain date without “Second” or “New Edition” on its title-page. Buyers of this school were indifferent to the disfigurement of library labels on side or end-paper; gave no thought to errata slips; but shaved their favourites, fore-edge and tail, dressed them in uniform calf gilt, affixed a bookplate, and went their way.
Such collectors as these are still amongst us, but they are now awaking to the folly of their past. The market—that indisputable witness to human taste—gives hard but practical proof of their wrongdoing. “Good and original condition” is nowadays three-quarters of a book's value, and the fraction, if it alters at all, will with the passage of time increase rather than decrease.
Is it too much to hope that the importance of original condition has now been permanently realized? The change, if it has really been effected, is in the main a healthy one. Although—for it is undeniable—the craze for the fine copy has produced its own extremism; although there are to-day book-lovers who refuse even to open the pages of their books lest, by such violation, they unsuit them for a mart in which, conventionally enough, virginity is value; although advance prospectuses and dust jackets of contemporary publications have scrupulously to be preserved in order that a “set” be genuinely complete—the desire for a book as issued does at least argue a consciousness of its individual personality. Standard authors, be they ancient or modern, can be purchased in calf by telephone and at so much per yard; but the obtaining of shelf furniture in original cloth is a matter of much seeking and of progress measured in fractions of an inch.
It has seemed well thus to emphasize the importance of “condition” to the modern book-collector, because “condition” in the case of such authors as those here examined is their admirer's greatest problem, and because the few bibliographies that already exist, while listing dates of publication and in one case at least supplying adequate collation of the various volumes, do not provide any real description of the externals of those volumes when in original state.
This description I have endeavoured to supply. That my work contains errors of omission I am certain; that it be free from errors of commission I may hardly dare to hope. But the trouble I have had even to arrive thus far on the way to completeness encourages belief that some portion of the donkey work may now be regarded as done for good and all, and that the trained minds of bibliographers proper may, if they incline, turn their talent to such refinements of detail as surely underlie many of the books herein examined.
To the collecting of first editions of Victorian novelists I came by the honourable way of literary liking. Brought up on Jane Austen, Scott, and Dickens, I read, during my years of flapperdom, Marryat, Trollope, and Wilkie Collins. Oxford and the audacities of undergraduate curiosity estranged me from all save the last quarter of the nineteenth century. While many of my contemporaries made sour sacrifice at the altars of disillusion, feeding their pessimism on Gissing and Butler, their taste for paradox on Bernard Shaw, I sought disreputable refuge among fleshly symbolists. The children of Baudelaire and Poe jostled the faint offspring of Gaelic legend on my shelves, and, while the voluptuous pallor of tuberoses shone against blue wall-paper, imagination floated on the dim tide of decadence. Came reaction as swift and irrational as were inevitable. From Paris echoed the clash of neo-barbarism, and before the strident onslaught of the rediscovered primitive the faint elegance of a pose too exhausted even for sin dissolved in air. They were great days, those early days of the new brutality. Blues and mauves gave place to orange checked with black, to vivid greens, to fierce outrageous reds. From the scented secrecy of lamplit boudoirs the young intellectual rushed into the wind and sunshine, and he who once made tired love to Phryne on a couch of silk now clipped the milkmaid grossly in a ditch. The way of other tastes went taste in letters and in art. After d'Annunzio, Synge; after Verlaine, Verhaeren; after Pater, Hardy; after Rops and Carrière, Gauguin and the rest.
For a while all was well. Cubism, a false interpretation of the synthetic doctrine of Cézanne, began its brief and rigid reign. Painters and writers fled naturalism in a search for true reality. Some are still wandering, drearily absurd, in the desert of their own bleak imaginings. The rest found reality, truly enough and rapidly enough—in war.
And now war has passed, leaving a world weary of fact and fever, weary of striving, weary almost of its own ideals. For long enough yet will persist turbulent discomfort and the clamour of quacks hawking the millennium; but at last will be peace, and it is surely a longing for that peace that has turned men's minds partly to high romance, but more generally to the manners and genius of a century ago. Those of an older generation than my own have, perhaps, never betrayed their gentle Victorian heritage. One may envy and applaud their wisdom. But we prodigals, returned from our rioting and sick with the husks of a démodé violence, stoop to any self-abasement, to any denial of our own past judgment, so we be allowed entry to the quiet courts and ordered opulence of the age we once affected to despise. Literary enthusiasm expresses itself in various ways. For my part to love an author is to collect him, for I can read no borrowed books, and only with difficulty such as are not first editions. Of the absurdity of this I am cheerfully aware. We have each one of us our foible, and this is mine. Considered broadly it is harmless enough, less cruel than killing birds, less degrading than drink. Naturally, however, it cannot be indulged to more than limited degree. Shakespeare and Sterne and Keats and Browning I may own, but in reprint. And so with many another. But to the extent possible in fact and a little beyond that permissible in money, I have contrived, from one phase to another, to keep myself fairly supplied with “reading firsts.” A decadent, I collected Verlaine and Mallarmé, Rimbaud and the Anglo-Irish nineties; a neo-primitive, I bought Synge and Verhaeren, Conrad and the chief Georgian poets of the new simplicity. And so matters progressed, while gradually novels ousted poetry from my shelves, and, again gradually, from the reading of modern novels I came once more to Trollope and the writers of his age.